Elemental picks up another customer

Elemental Technologies said Columbus Communications is using its Elemental Live products to power the encoding of content for the latter’s new multi-screen video services.

Columbus Communications is a retail and wholesale telecommunications company in the Caribbean and in Latin America. The service provider will use Elemental Live to encode more than 250 linear broadcast channels simultaneously, allowing subscribers to view live television broadcasts from Internet-connected devices such as hybrid set-top boxes, PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Columbus plans to commercialize the new services in September. In the initial deployment, Elemental Live is used to create adaptive bit rate streams for both Apple Live Streaming (HLS) and Microsoft Smooth Streaming.

Cable customers in the greater Caribbean and Latin American region, including Jamaica, Trinidad‚ Curacao and Grenada, will initially have access to live broadcast output streams and an on-demand video library on PC, iPhone and iPad platforms. In subsequent phases, support for hybrid set-top boxes and larger-screen viewing will be available.

In addition, Columbus is using the Elemental Server to prepare thousands of hours of on-demand video content that authenticated users can access anytime and anywhere through a unified application interface.

“Transcoding is a critical component of the architecture supporting our new multi-screen video services, and Elemental is strategic to the deployment,” said Darren Richer, chief technology officer at Columbus Communications. “The key differentiators that influenced our decision to work with Elemental versus competitors include overall video quality, high-performance software, system scalability, significant reduction in power consumption, a smaller hardware footprint and lower maintenance costs.”

Elemental earlier this week announced a third-round financing haul of $13 million.